Wartime diary solves mystery of Hess's secret flight

Page Tools

Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess hoped to strike a deal with Britain whereby it would fight with Germany against the Soviet Union.

A brief entry in the diary of the wife of a British spy has led
to the discovery of the true story behind one of the greatest
mysteries of World War II - the bizarre flight to Britain in 1941
of Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess.

No single incident in Britain's wartime history has given birth
to so many conspiracy theories, all of them centred on an alleged
plot by the intelligence services to lure Hess to Britain.

They range from suggestions that the man imprisoned as Hess by
the Allies after the war was not the real Hess, who allegedly died
in a 1942 air crash, to claims that British psychological warfare
experts conned him into coming to Britain so they could use him in
an anti-Nazi propaganda campaign.

The response from academics has always been disparaging. They
regard the conspiracy theories as patent nonsense and invariably
dismiss any claim of serious involvement of the intelligence agency
MI6.

But the diary has revealed that MI6 was not only heavily
involved in the run-up to Hess's flight but even planned "a sting
operation" aimed at luring Hess or another prominent German into
bogus peace talks.

The diary belonged to the wife of Frank Foley, the leading
German expert in MI6 who was in charge of the year-long debriefing
of the deputy Fuhrer.

Hess flew to Britain on May 10, 1941, intent on making contact
with the Duke of Hamilton, who he believed would help him mediate a
peace deal whereby Britain would join Nazi Germany in a war against
the Soviet Union.

Winston Churchill, Britain's wartime prime minister, was
convinced the scheme had produced an intelligence windfall.

But Churchill was wrong. Hess knew astonishingly little and, to
make matters worse, Foley swiftly realised he was mad.

That is where the role of both MI6 and Foley in the Hess affair
officially begins and ends.

But the emergence of Kay Foley's diary changed all that,
sparking an investigation that has uncovered the truth about Rudolf
Hess.

The most puzzling entries in her diary by far concerned a
two-week visit to Lisbon that Foley made in January 1941.

The dates were intriguing. In September 1940, seven months
before Hess flew to Britain, one of his close advisers, Albrecht
Haushofer, had written to the Duke of Hamilton at Hess's request,
attempting to set up a meeting in Lisbon. The letter, sent via an
intermediary, was intercepted and passed to MI5, who initially
suspected Hamilton and the intermediary might be German spies.

By November 1940, they had realised this was not the case and
spent some months considering whether or not to send Hamilton to
Lisbon to meet Haushofer.

The plan was eventually discarded as too dangerous but the
letter's very existence has always fuelled the allegation at the
heart of the conspiracy theories - that British intelligence lured
Hess to Britain.

Only MI6 could say for sure what Foley was doing in Lisbon. The
service still refuses to release any of its own files, but it does
retain a number of "old boys" as historians to look after them.

Their immediate response was that Foley must have gone to Lisbon
to look at a potential double-cross operation, a reference to the
highly successful system whereby the vast majority of Nazi spies
sent to Britain were "turned" by British intelligence to provide
false information to the Germans.

Although Foley did eventually take over as head of the MI6
Double-Cross section, this did not happen until 15 months
later.

Told this, the MI6 historian went back and checked the files.
What he found was the answer to the mystery that has puzzled
historians for more than 50 years.

Much of the MI6 archive on Hess has been destroyed. But in the
remaining files there was a single, more recent reference which
spoke of MI6 plans for "a sting operation" in response to the
Haushofer letter.

The MI6 historian also has access to oral histories from former
officers and, where they are still alive, the officers themselves.
By delving into this "folk memory", he discovered that Foley had
flown to Lisbon to see whether it was possible to use a meeting
with Haushofer to set up a sting.

As with most events that become the subject of conspiracy
theories, the truth about Hess has turned out to be much more
mundane. Haushofer had always warned Hess that the attempt to go
through Hamilton was likely to fail and that it might be necessary
to send "a neutral intermediary".

When it did fail, the deputy Fuhrer clearly decided that he
could not afford to leave such an important task to someone else
and simply went himself.